Various devices and tools are used in the manufacturing industry, including assembly machines and inspection devices. Some of these manufacturing devices need a configuration task to register parameters and data for use in their actual operations. Such a configuration task for a manufacturing device is sometimes called “teaching” and often done by a human operator capable of properly recognizing the situation and making an appropriate decision according to information detected in the device. The teaching is therefore a time-consuming task, and the accuracy of its result depends heavily on the operator's skill level. It is not simple and easy to computerize a teaching process because of the difficulty in recognizing which pieces of detected information are useful for the operations of the device.
As one technique in the above field, a teaching system is proposed for assisting an operator in teaching an inspection device. The proposed system is formed from a personal computer, a monitor, a mouse, and the like and coupled to a visual inspection device designed to inspect a work under test. The visual inspection device tests the work on the basis of pictures taken by a camera that moves from one inspection point to another. The teaching system helps the operator with the task of giving such a camera path into the visual inspection device. More specifically, the personal computer offers three-dimensional (3D) computer-aided design (CAD) functions to display virtual images of a work on its monitor screen, as if a camera takes pictures of the work. The operator manipulates the personal computer to produce desired inspection images on the monitor screen and specifies each appropriate one of those images. The personal computer calculates an inspection point corresponding to each inspection image specified by the operator and then determines in what order to inspect the resulting points. See, for example, Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2005-52926.
The above-described teaching system allows the operator to execute a teaching task in a virtual space based on 3D CAD techniques, without actually operating the visual inspection device, but only by watching virtual pictures on a monitor screen. The proposed way of teaching is useful in previously selecting and checking an appropriate motion path of a camera, so that it will visit a plurality of inspection points without making the camera-carrying robot collide against the work. However, choosing proper inspection points in the virtual inspection pictures is still the operator's responsibility. This is a time-consuming task in which a human operator is called for to recognize the situation and make a right decision. Automation in such a human-related part of teaching tasks would make it more efficient to configure and operate manufacturing devices.